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holy_calamity writes "A European project has produced this one-armed 'babybot' that learns like a human child. It experiments and knocks things over until it can pick them up for itself. Interestingly the next step is to build a fully humanoid version that's open source in both software and hardware."

From TFA: "The goal is to build a humanoid 2-year-old child," explains Metta. This will have all of Babybot's abilities and the researchers hope it may eventually even learn how to walk. "It will definitely crawl," says Metta, "and is designed so that walking is mechanically possible."
Not a bad goal at all, and if it's open source they can't cheat by promoting a specific goal such as walking in the software. Reminds me of Prey where they couldn't figure out how to get the nanomachine swarm to fly so they let its AI "learn" how to do it on its own.

They may not use a simple goal like walking, but in order to learn there has to be some sort of reward/punishment system in place.Real babies have goals like getting their parents' attention, being fed, keeping warm.I wonder what sort of goals a robot baby has to have to learn in the same way a real one does.

Oh god, I just had this flash back of being so very proud, and then so very terrified when my first child learned to stand up and walk.Open Sores Suggestion: Independent power supply, to me, is the single biggest choke point. I would suggest that the power supply be able to survive for about 3 hours, with the "baby bottle alarm" going off at the 2 hour mark; If after 3 hours and a "feeding" has not occured, then go to "hibernation/nap mode".

Not a bad goal at all, and if it's open source they can't cheat by promoting a specific goal such as walking in the software.

Yes. AI scientists have a bad habit of making implausible claims for their creations. The open approach will keep them honest and is to be commended. At the very least, such a robot needs several types of learning functions including perceptual, short and long term memory mechanisms, concept formation, pattern completion, anticipatory behavior, motor learning and coordination, operant

Aren't you afraid this poor open source robot will get exploited by the other robots, or do the proprietary robots have something to hide? What kind of insults can we expect? Your father was a code monkey and your mother got her card punched by a UNIVAC!

Don't fire them, give them a bonus! If they had picked some other boring name, do you really think the article would have, e.g., made in on/.? The name might very well be the deciding factor in their getting continued funding (as sad as that may be).

So this bot is going to lie in its crib, thrashing its arms and legs, screaming at the top of its lungs, until someone picks it, gives it a full juice bottle, a cookie and walks it around trying desparately to amuse it?

On a more serious note, can anyone define "Open source hardware"? Short of publishing blueprints for the chips, how can you open source it? Publishing a parts list and assembly instructions is not open source...

So this bot is going to lie in its crib, thrashing its arm and legs, screaming at the top of its lungs, until someone picks it, gives it a full juice bottle, a cookie and walks it around trying desparately to amuse it?

The goal is to build a humanoid 2-year-old child," explains Metta. This will have all of Babybot's abilities and the researchers hope it may eventually even learn how to walk.

A fun project, and potentially a good step on the road towards human-like intelligence. However, the "2-year-old" remark is again one of those far-fetched promises that is a loooooooooooooong way off. Making a robot-arm play with a rubber ducky is one thing, letting a robot understand what a rubber ducky is, is quite another. Making a robot crawl is one thing, but letting a robot crawl with a self-conscious purpose, again is quite another.

Fortunately, one of the researcher in TFA admits that 20 computers with a neural network on each is no replacement for a human brain. But the 2-year-old remark follows later, and is evidently entered as a way to generate funding. It sounds cool, but it is not what the result of this project will be. I assume the researchers know this all too well. Or perhaps they have no children of their own.

Fortunately, one of the researcher in TFA admits that 20 computers with a neural network on each is no replacement for a human brain. But the 2-year-old remark follows later, and is evidently entered as a way to generate funding. It sounds cool, but it is not what the result of this project will be. I assume the researchers know this all too well. Or perhaps they have no children of their own.

Think of how Social Services could use something like this if it can act like a 2 year-old. Do they want to make

This particular experiment is not going to create a 2-year old. We have had robots and simulations of robots that have used neutral nets to see if motor skill can be optimised using learning-like techniques. We have had recognition programs that do the same things that our eye and brain system do. This is an intelligent combination of the two.

However, just suppose, and then suppose, and then suppose...

So far, we can build computers that can simulate brain cells. There is nothing stopping us making a computer that has a similar complexity to the brain. We will have to mimic the strange mix of part-design, part randomness that brains are. Or maybe we can just throw more computing power, and stuff the brain doesn't have, like the ability to back up and regress. Sooner or later - probably later is my guess, but who knows? - we are going to come up with something that shows intelligence, and probably has inteligence.

African grey parrots are kept as pets. These are said to be as intelligent as a two-year old. Some of them can understand sentances from a vocabulary of hundreds of words. They don't progress much beyond a two year old. And they are Not Like Us, so it's OK to keep them in cages. Apparently. Hmmm.

One day, someone is going to make something intelligent, and then turn it off, and there will be an outcry. Is anyone doing the thinking on the ethics of making it before making it?

One day, someone is going to make something intelligent, and then turn it off, and there will be an outcry. Is anyone doing the thinking on the ethics of making it before making it?

Yes, of course people are thinking about this. Philosophers, cognitive scientists and AI researchers all frequently discuss such subjects. But why would turning an "intelligent" computer off cause an outcry? A truly intelligent agent will likely need a substantial amount of memory. This suggests to me that it will involve a per

I guess it would if you turned the computer off without its consent. The question is how much say a computer has in determining what is done to it. I give a surgeon permission to turn me off for a while if an operation must be performed on me. If I am going to add extra memory to an intelligent computer for which it needs rebooting, I am going to politely ask if it would not mind being turned off for half an hour or so. And I expect the c

This is fine if you promise to wake it up again. But young children can get scared of going to sleep because they do not feel in control of when they wake up again. My ones never did, but I am told it happens.

Ever read the original 'Frankenstein'? In particular, the bit were the doctor meets the 'monster' on the glacier, and the 'monster' demands that Frankenstein - who he regards as someone who has taken of the role and therefore the responsibilities of a creating god - finishes the job properly and give

Good point. We can't because flatworms all have the same neurons, and we know exactly when we have got anything wrong. But creating a neural net computer with a similar complexity and connectivity to the human brain - which I am told is quite feasable today, though it may not do anything useful - is a long way from creating a simulation of a particular human brain, and then asking it what it had for breakfast.

African grey parrots are kept as pets. These are said to be as intelligent as a two-year old. Some of them can understand sentances from a vocabulary of hundreds of words. They don't progress much beyond a two year old. And they are Not Like Us, so it's OK to keep them in cages. Apparently. Hmmm.

But we keep ywo year olds of our own species, in cages. Haven't you watched "Rugrats"?? they were kept in cages!

African grey parrots are kept as pets. These are said to be as intelligent as a two-year old. Some of them can understand sentances from a vocabulary of hundreds of words. They don't progress much beyond a two year old. And they are Not Like Us, so it's OK to keep them in cages. Apparently. Hmmm.

Most people keep small children in cages, they just normally refer to them as cribs, cots or playpens. Oh and don't get started on swaddling, okay that is only up to sbout 5 months.

The difficulty is coming up with a consistent ethical policy that is reasonable, and works when relating to bacteria, plants, animals, humans, superior aliens, and machines. It seems obvious that all life including bacteria can't be given human rights. But where do you draw the line between bacteria and humans? If you decide that rats can be killed, experimented on, eaten, etc, then how do you argue that aliens or super intelligent machines shouldn't declare humans insignificantly better than rats, and deci

A fun project, and potentially a good step on the road towards human-like intelligence. However, the "2-year-old" remark is again one of those far-fetched promises that is a loooooooooooooong way off. Making a robot-arm play with a rubber ducky is one thing, letting a robot understand what a rubber ducky is, is quite another.

How do we know the 2 year old does understand what a ruber ducky is?

Of course their brain may understand the rubber ducky is "that yellow thing... that feels a certain way... has that c

I, too, am astonished by some of the results of extremely simple "algorithms". It's called "emergent behaviour" (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergence [wikipedia.org]). My favorite is the shoal of fish.

Neural nets running on a cluster of computers is quite a lot more complex. I can only hope that they're looking to improve the ANN paradigm to take us that little bit closer to real AI, rather than just using existing techniques to prove a point.

Anyway, I'm going to hunt around for more data on this. It looks intere

I think it's amazing how such simple data structures can generate such complex behaviour.

I am amazed that you are amazed. Simple behavior is at the root of _all_ complex systems: simple interactions between molecules give rise to climate. Cells in a finite state machine produce complex emergent behaviour.

I think it's amazing how such simple data structures can generate such complex behaviour.

Me, on the other hand, think it's pretty amazing how simplistic behaviour these basic models can recreate and still be at the forefront of academic research. Simple statistical models outperform AI-techniques on most classification problems any day. They bloody well shouldn't!

I'm an AI grad student, and I can tell you that (rather complex) statistical learning methods, which are considered part of AI, blow most simple methods (and neural nets) out of the water on most classification problems these days. In fact, I'm procrastinating from my project involving SVMs [wikipedia.org] right now to write this comment.

Perhaps by AI you're referring just to neural nets? While people get them to do some cool things, these (in the for you're used to seeing them in) are at the very very "dumb end" of A

I'm an AI grad student, and I can tell you that (rather complex) statistical learning methods, which are considered part of AI,

That's what I said:)

Perhaps by AI you're referring just to neural nets?

By AI I'm referring to something that is not inheretly (too) bound by the abstractions required to make it work. EG; how easily transferable is the experience from numbers to actualc concepts. Various forms of regression analysis and stuff sure do wonders, but to be honest, they feel so inheretly limited

Is that AI in the sense that a bayesian filter doesn't need to know what is trying to sell me stuff and what isn't, it just learns? Or would the data set need to be able to be transferred to things other than plain text?

I think we, the AI community, are making actual progress. The problem is that the problem is much harder than people thought it would be back when it first emerged.

Statistical models have done wonders for a lot of things. Classification, mentioned above, is one of the most obvious successes. Natural language processing is another surprising success of statistical methods. The use of hidden markov models has solved a number of problems that were difficult using symbolic approaches (mostly dealing with

If by "relevant" you mean "relevant to humans" you would often be right by definition, since classifier performance is often measured relative to a human baseline. SVM is a hell of a lot faster as classifying though.

However, I have known SVM to outperform humans on some tasks, such as identifying genes correlated with cancer diagnoses.

"Everything about it will be open source, including the hardware, so anyone can use it in their own work," Metta says.

I'm unclear on this concept. Do they mean off the shelf commodity parts? Blueprints so that you can machine the parts yourself, if you have a lathe? Or is open source going to become a euphemism like "five finger discount"?

Seriously, what is Open Source Hardware, if it's not just a sorry misuse of a buzzword?

Ok call me a scifi nut but who on/. isnt? But can you say Cylon? Him first we start with Babybot, then crawlingbot, then a Walking Chrome Toaster, then 12 new human like models. All beleiving that there creator is flawed and is now believing in our God or Gods pending your religion.....

With true AI, it learns based on example and stores such memories as algorithms. Over time, such algorithms can be modified and honed for specific skill sets. While you could design something that acts like AI with a dictionary of predefined algorithms, it's still not AI...it's an illusion of AI. If you ask me, that defeats the purpose of AI research.

Have anyone seen the video?I have seen 2 (all?) of them and I have noticed that the bot had to rest his hand on the surface everytime he fails the task before attempting again. Why does it have to do that?

Also. At first I have noticed that the bot drops objects into the hand of the researcher. But later I have noticed that it just drops it in the particular place (second video, pile of objects on the right at the level of the babytable). I guess the reasearcher sticks his hand so the object drops into his h

I'm just guessing, but it's likely b/c you have to do certain things for safety when working with robots, even (especially?) in research. Getting positioning like that is very, very hard without constant homing and range checking. I imagine it would also be difficult to "learn" unless you tried it the same way until you got it right.

the next step is to build a fully humanoid version that's open source in both software and hardware."

You mean, one where the microcode for any processor included in it is published openly, and the masks used at the chip foundry are also openly published? Or if it's a FPGA 'Free Hardware' design, all design details of the FPGA silicon are disclosed, and all of the code for the FPGA development software is open source (good luck)?

A disturbing number of murders have occurred in the LIRA labs at the Genoa University. Victims appear to have been strangled, but a lack of fingerprints makes identification of the suspect problematic.

I applaud their work towards an open-source model. The model this is derived from--aka "human"--has been closed source since its creation almost 6000 years ago. The copyright expired long ago, but its Creator is unwilling to open its source. Many people cannot find the Creator, and some even doubt He is still around to release the source.The human model has proven difficult to reverse engineer. We need its source to help fix bugs. For example, it's susceptible to viruses in its current state.

This seems like a good idea. I've always wondered why AI researchers want to try making AI that begins its existance near the level of an adult, with an understanding of language, "commons sense", etc... I understand it in that language recognition is an important piece of the AI puzzle, but researchers who want to make a "human-like" robot seem to aim too high.

Even the human brain, extremely advanced compared to where we're at in the creation of intelligence, starts out nearly helpless and takes years